Missed ballots found; Cobb must recertify primary results

Jun. 4—MARIETTA — The Cobb County Board of Elections voted 2-1 Friday to recertify the results of the May 24 election after staff discovered that a memory card containing 2,203 ballots had not been uploaded before the board certified results on Tuesday. The new results did not change the outcome of any races.

At the hastily arranged morning meeting, board members Steven Bruning and Jennifer Mosbacher voted in favor of certifying the corrected results, while board member Pat Gartland voted against. Board Chair Tori Silas and board member Jessica Brooks were absent.

Cobb Elections Director Janine Eveler said the error occurred when a card that stored ballots from seven precincts was not uploaded by the elections staffer responsible for doing so.

All seven of those precincts had two ballot scanners, but only the card containing ballots for one scanner was uploaded. (Most precincts have only one scanner; results from four other precincts with two scanners were uploaded correctly.)

"The root cause is that the person that did it didn't have a checklist of which ones had two scanners, and which ones had one scanner," Eveler said. "Which had been our process before, but we have a new person doing it."

The checklist Eveler referenced has been used by staff for years to ensure all cards are uploaded, she said, when asked by Mosbacher what could be done to prevent such errors in the future.

"That knowledge didn't get passed from the person leaving to the new person. So we'll implement that again. And also, the report that identified this ... was a report that I started looking at after we had done certification," Eveler said. "I will put that further up in the process."

Gartland voted against certification at a lively Tuesday meeting where Republican activists pleaded with the board to not certify results, citing irregularities.

Eveler on Tuesday outlined a series of issues that had occurred during early voting and on Election Day. Up to 157 ballots were affected by an encoding error on the first day of early voting that led to some voters receiving ballots that were missing an election they were eligible to vote in, or included an election they were ineligible to vote in.

In another instance of redistricting-related issues, some streets were incorrectly included or excluded in the Vinings cityhood referendum. Eveler estimated the issue affected 90 voters in that election, which was decided by a 312-vote margin.

Other Election Day problems included ballot scanners jamming and having to be opened to be unjammed.

Gartland told the MDJ after Friday's meeting he voted against both certifications because there were "too many discrepancies," and that he wishes an audit had been done.

"All the people that showed up (on Tuesday), some of them were invalid, but some of them were good questions," Gartland said. "And so I would have liked to have, whether we have to do an audit, or a hand count, whatever ... let's make sure everybody feels at ease with this, because there were people that definitely didn't feel good about it."

Bruning said in an interview he regretted the error, but pointed out that elections staff caught the discrepancy before the results were sent to the state election board.

"It's a human error," Bruning said. "No election, ever, is perfect. And it's not a system problem. ... It's a human problem. We have employees and they make mistakes, that's just part of the election. I wish we had caught it earlier, so that we wouldn't have to have this second certification. But we didn't."

Regarding an audit or hand recount, Eveler said there simply isn't time to do one for the entire county, because staff are already preparing for the June 21 primary runoff.

"We've done our due diligence," Eveler said. "We wouldn't have found errors if we weren't really looking carefully at the results. So we're checking ourselves, and I would not mind at all doing the hand count audit, which has been requested by several people. But we have such a short timeframe to do this runoff, that we can't do that right now. We could do it after the runoff, but the legislature has given us only four weeks, instead of what we used to have with nine weeks, between the primary and the primary runoff."

Eveler announced later on Friday afternoon that elections staff would conduct a hand count audit of the election-day ballots in the Vinings 04 precinct, for the Vinings cityhood referendum only, in order to ensure the accuracy of the ballot scanners.

Cobb GOP Chair Salleigh Grubbs, who attended Friday's special meeting, said she was frustrated that the memory card issue wasn't found before certification.

"I think that that's one of the issues is that there's such a big rush to get it to the state ... Having the meeting done this quickly didn't give us any opportunity to review the votes. And I don't think it's fair to the candidates," Grubbs said.